Summary Of The Excerpt From Silent Spring

The excerpt from Silent Spring began by describing a scene we all could recognize: a prosperous farmland, with a successful and healthy people inhabiting it. Every detail and description was clear and tangible, almost as if the readers could see the scene. This did draw them in, but the lack of information found at the end of the piece was able to captivate the readers even more so. At the very end of Carson’s tale, we see that the dreary and forlorn town was sprinkled with “a white granular powder [that] still showed a few patches.” Carson even goes on to state that “The people had done it themselves”, and that the mysterious powder was there a few weeks before the town suddenly began to suffer. In essence, Carson stated that the white powder
was to blame, but what really captivates readers about this description was how she never identified the powder itself. This is where imagination and curiosity run rampant through readers as they form their own hypothesis on why the town. Perhaps the white powder was ash and the town was caught in some nuclear war and was poisoned by radiation, or maybe it was a pesticide and it had injured all the townspeople with its hazardous side effects. Regardless of the speculated thoughts, the exact reason was never stated in the story, and readers had to read on into Carson’s Silent Spring in order to find out what exactly had caused the town and its people so much pain. Thus, she captivated readers by not sharing the cause of the town’s suffering, and she kept readers interested and attentive with a narrative and a possible example.